Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Her belly curves, her breasts swell, her limbs are taffy caught in the pull, her mouth is salt tang and bitter.

“No,” she snaps. “Do you hear me? No.”

Her ears pop, and a dull throb spreads through her abdomen, radiates in a slow spiral to her back. Moaning through clenched teeth, she fumbles for the faucet.

The pain ebbs. Her stomach, her limbs, are perfectly normal, perfectly fine. She rinses away the taste of the ocean with mouthwash, hears only the normal rush of water when she turns the faucet back on.

Tess wakes in the middle of the night with her pulse racing. In her dream, she was on the beach, running toward Emily, and she stopped her before her feet met the water but when Emily turned around, she wasn’t Emily but other , her skin the white of a deep-sea creature and cold as the Atlantic Ocean in January.

Tess turns on her bedside light and scrubs the sleep from her eyes. The sheets are gritty against her feet, and she throws back the covers — sand coats both cotton and skin. Hands clamped tight over her mouth can’t keep in the shout.

Without curtains hanging at the windows, sunlight floods Emily’s bedroom. Tess lugs in paint, brushes, and a canvas tarp, and pulls the bed toward the center of the room. From behind the headboard, something thumps to the floor; Tess retrieves the sketchbook with tears shimmering in her eyes.

From the time she could hold a crayon in a chubby fist, Emily loved to draw and while not a prodigy, her passion made up for it in spades. The first picture is her favorite dinosaur, stegosaurus; the pages that follow show more dinosaurs, a picture of Tess wearing a superhero cape, the beach at night, a second sketch of the beach with a scattering of shells, and then the beach with the waves high and arcing and a dark outline in the raised water.

Tess sinks down on the edge of the bed. The shape in the water, done in crude strokes of pencil, is not a whale or a prehistoric shark. It’s alien and wrong with too many limbs, too many curves. Tess flips the page. Yet another sketch of the same, the lines more defined, darker, the likeness slightly different, but still improbable. In the next sketch, the shape has altered even more, as if Emily couldn’t quite capture on paper what she wanted. Tess’s fingers leave indentations in the paper. This can’t be real. It can’t be right.

“Who are you?” Tess says. “ What are you?”

What she can’t bring herself to say aloud: why did you take my daughter?

Tess stands on the beach, wind tossing sand into her face and twisting her nightgown around her hips. Her mouth opens but nothing escapes. Is she dreaming? Dreaming awake? She turns in a slow circle, spies the steady tracks her feet left behind.

The waves begin to recede, and she freezes in place. A dark silhouette twists beneath the changing water; pain threads through her body, the darkness moves closer, and she sees—

No. It’s too much. She closes her eyes, can’t bear to look. The agony seizes her tight; when it loosens its hold, Tess runs, kicking sand in wide arcs. Behind her, the waves crash upon the shore, and she hears something else beneath — a moan, a whisper.

(Emily said Mother . That’s what she said, and Tess knew she wasn’t calling out to her, wasn’t referring to her in any way.)

By the time she gets to the porch, she’s sobbing hard enough that her chest aches, and when Vicky grabs her arm, she shrieks.

“Tess? What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Talk to me. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Words spill from Tess’s lips, and she knows they don’t make sense, but she can’t make them stop.

Vicky shoves a glass in her hand. “Drink.”

Tess does, grateful to wash the salt from her tongue.

“Now take a deep breath and talk to me. What happened?”

“I woke up on the beach, and I saw something in the water. I saw, I don’t know, I couldn’t look, but I know it was there. I felt it. It was there the night Emily went into the water, too. I know it was. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was there. I think it wants something from me, but I don’t know what it wants. I don’t know what to—”

“Shhh, take another drink.”

“You don’t understand. Emily saw it, too. She drew it in her sketchbook—”

Vicky presses the glass gently to her mouth. Tess drinks, this time wincing at the liquor burn.

“Okay,” Vicky says. “I don’t know what you thought you saw, or whether you just had a bad dream or what, but maybe you need to get away from here for a while. I know things have been rough, maybe being close to where it happened isn’t good for you right now.”

Tess pushes the glass back in Vicky’s hand. Vicky continues to talk, and Tess responds in the right places with the right phrases while her thoughts drift elsewhere.

She sleeps on the bathroom floor with the water running. Spends the day in the kitchen with the faucet on full blast and the sketchbook in her lap. Ignores Vicky’s knocks at the door.

“Why did you want my daughter?” she says over and over, the tone of her voice as foreign as the thing in Emily’s sketches. “What more do you want from me?”

After the sunlight bleeds from the sky, she waits until Vicky goes back into her apartment and creeps down the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible. Her hands are shaking when she walks onto the beach, and she steps as close to the water as she dares.

“I’m here,” she calls out into the wind.

The waves break and crash, break and crash. Tess steps closer.

“I’m here,” she shouts. “Isn’t this what you want? Goddammit, isn’t this what you fucking want from me?”

The wind tears her words to ribbons. She steps into the waves, hissing at the sudden sting of cold. Like fabric gathered in a hand, the waves recede, and Tess links her fingers together, wills herself to keep still. The water withdraws even more, and a leviathan, the shape from Emily’s sketchbook, undulates beneath the darkness. Goosebumps rise on her arms; her nipples go hard and painful; a shiver makes a circuit on the racetrack of her spine. The air thrums with an electric undercurrent.

A distant gaze bores into hers. A distant mind delves, tastes. An image of Emily’s face flickers in her peripheral vision, flickers and breaks apart into nothing at all.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Tess shrieks. “Just give me back my daughter.”

Her mouth is salt and seaweed. Crab claws dig into her stomach, and she falls to her hands and knees. Her abdomen swells; something unfolds inside her, shoving razored points and spiked edges against the confines of her womb. She grips fistfuls of sand and arches her back, lets loose a keening wail.

Muffled by the water, another wail echoes her own, but Tess isn’t sure if she’s hearing it in her ears or only her mind. She rolls onto her back, supports herself with her elbows, and draws up her knees. The grotesque curve of her belly ripples, and as the claws dig in again, the other cries out as well, a great and terrible groaning cry.

Tess arches her back as an urge to push fills her body. She strains with all her might. And then again. The world melts into shadow and stardust, leaving only the torment inside her and the exertion of her muscles. She screams as something breaks free and falls flat on her back, panting.

Reaching under her nightgown, she expects to find ribbons of torn flesh, and although the contact makes her wince, her vulva is intact, albeit swollen, and there’s nothing beneath her but sand. Her stomach is flat, but the skin is loose, elastic.

Emily emerges from the water, walking as though she’s forgotten how legs work. Tess climbs to her feet, staggers forward, and then halts, her mouth in a wide O. Beneath a mottled covering of viscous liquid and traces of sand — a nightmarish mockery of lanugo — Emily’s skin is sea-pale. Where once she had a navel, she now has a fleshy protuberance resembling an ornate skeleton key emerging from a lock. She blinks once, twice, and nictitating membranes roll back, revealing black eyes — shark eyes — and Tess swallows a scream. This isn’t Emily, it can’t be.